Early in An African Election the New Patriotic Party (NPP) presidential candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, upon the official launch of his campaign, reminds his fellow Ghanaians that “the eyes of the world are on us here.” And indeed, despite the controversial and often chaotic nature of the 2008 election in Ghana, Jarreth Merz’s documentary offers an optimistic testament to this country’s desire to be once again “the black star of Africa,” this time in democracy, and its resolve to show the world, in the words of a National Democratic Congress (NDC) party spokeswoman, that the continent need not always be “looked at as a basket case.” This is not to say that it has been an easy mantle to bear, or that the film is merely a feel-good story about Ghana’s newfound love of the ballot box. That would be giving far too little credit to the Ghanaian people, or to Merz as a filmmaker. What we see instead—with a portrayal that is accomplished with nuance and an impressive sense of immediacy—is how precariously the integrity of the democratic process held together in December 2008, when the strain of a bitterly close election (and subsequent runoff) between Akufo-Addo and the NDC candidate Atta Mills was at its height, and when the impulse toward antidemocratic solutions and violence—legacies of both Ghana’s colonial past and much of its fifty years since independence—seemed to loom greatest.

What makes the film utterly riveting is Merz’s bold insistence on being the “fly on the wall” at every twist and turn. In the best tradition of election films and direct cinema—from Robert Drew’s 1960 groundbreaking film, Primary, to D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s 1993 documentary tour de force, The War Room—we are right there on stage with the candidates at teeming party rallies, in the car with them driving around Accra, alongside them on the campaign trail, and inside many a crowded room for press conferences and photo ops. An African Election also provides the occasional insider view of the Ghanaian electoral process. Foremost among these moments—and arguably the most engrossing sequence in the film—is an episode in which we are taken into the electoral commission’s “strong room” where the votes are collated, and where we see an NDC party agent beside himself when a late and mysterious fax comes in with inflated results, now favoring the NPP candidate. Merz’s approach, however, is neither purely observational nor without its own influence on the behaviors of those he is filming; during the “strong room” episode one almost gets the sense that everyone is very aware of the camera—the angry NDC party agent playing up to it, the sheepish NPP representative shying away from it, and the rest of the room embarrassed by its presence.

Transgressing the dogma of direct cinema, Merz interviews his subjects and includes relevant archival footage, ultimately to the benefit of the film. By deftly integrating these interview and archival clips with his election footage as the events unfold, Merz broadens our understanding of the historical, political, economic, continental, and global context of the election. Along the way, we hear from a diverse assortment of Ghanaians: the son of Kwame Nkrumah; former President Jerry Rawlings; standing President John Kufuor; current candidates Akufo-Addo and Atta Mills (the eventual winner); as well as the electoral commissioner, Afari-Gyan, who emerges as something of a calming counterpoise to the increasingly incendiary Rawlings. Moreover, we get insights and opinions from a governance expert, the comedian Kwaku Sintim-Misa, local journalists, party operatives, and various representatives of the vox populi (especially poignant among these are the interviews with an Oubasi gold miner and farmer, Moses Imoro).

However, for all its verité vibrancy and Mayslesian authenticity, An African Election does little to explore the social and economic issues at stake (such as the vast oil reserves that were discovered off Ghana’s coast in 2007), or, for that matter, what roles class and ethnicity occupy in twenty-first-century Ghanaian party politics. Moreover, within the election film genre Merz’s documentary falls somewhat short in terms of its insider view of the campaign. Outside the public realm, our access to Nana Akufo-Addo and Atta Mills is rather limited; neither candidate gives us (or Merz, perhaps) a true sense of his political persona or reveals much about himself to the camera—wittingly or unwittingly—as one often finds in the very best of election films. Nor do any of their operatives. Other than a one-minute sequence depicting a strategy session at NPP headquarters prior to the final rally, which itself comes off as a bit staged, the real machinations of the campaign remain hidden from view. And as a result there are no characters in the piece akin to Stephanopoulos and Carville in The War Room.

The same cannot be said for Jerry Rawlings, who in places, and for better or worse, takes over the documentary, far overshadowing the presidential candidates themselves. This could be considered a weakness of the film, but the former flight lieutenant and ex-president remains such a charismatic and popular figure in Ghana that one can hardly blame Merz for leaning so much on this footage. Likewise, Rawlings himself makes use of the film as a forum to launch biting critiques of the West. In one diatribe on “the savagery of capitalism,” pronounced as Rawlings drives himself in his Buick Riviera to the polls on election day, he lectures Merz on how the “unipolar superpower” America has been providing world leadership at the expense of morality, and thus “undermining the culture of democracy.” And yet at other moments in the film Rawlings seems unaware of the camera (or is he still playing up to it?) and is captured in moments of raw emotion: whether it is the shot of him watching the news at his residence two nights before the election, head in his hands, wiping tears from his eyes as he listens to Mills thank him publicly for his help with the campaign; or whether it is the close-ups of him in profile as he is driven to a nighttime rally in Tamale during the runoff election, where the strain begins to show and he is almost catatonic as his vehicle is mobbed by local youths, the ex-president overwhelmed (intoxicated?) by his own celebrity. Indeed, in some ways Rawlings is a microcosm of Ghana in this film. He desperately wants the democratic process to succeed, yet he is suspicious of it, and becomes frustrated by it when the election goes awry. Like Ghana itself, he seems to be struggling, as the film goes on, to resist the lure of the past—of strongman politics and the cult of personality. And in the end, like Ghana, he buries that past, and democracy triumphs.

It was once said, in a statement sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Such was the case as this review was being written. In Accra, the 2012 NDC candidate, John Mahama, was just sworn in as Ghana’s president in the wake of a disputed election against the repeat NPP candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo. Although there was no need for a runoff this time around, since Mahama received 50.7 percent of the vote, the NPP has now filed a petition to the Supreme Court challenging the election result—Ghana’s own version of Bush v. Gore (2000). And so like the Americans, it looks as if Ghanaians will just have to get used to two-party politics and split electorates.